Mossel Bay travel guide

Built along a rocky peninsula which provides sheltered swimming and mooring in the bay, Mossel Bay is one of the larger and less appealing seaside towns along the Garden Route. During the school holidays the town is packed – it receives one million domestic visitors in December alone – but for the rest of the year it is just another dull coastal town. A fact often overlooked in promotional literature is that since the discovery of offshore oil deposits, Mossel Bay is also the home of the ugly Mossgas natural gas refinery and a multitude of oil storage tanks. The town has a number of Portuguese flags and names dotted around, thanks to the first European to anchor in the bay – Bartolomeu Dias, who landed in February 1488. His efforts to communicate with local herdsmen were met with stone throwing, but Vasco da Gama, who moored in the bay in 1497, had more luck; he managed to establish trading relations with them. The bay’s safe anchorage and freshwater spring ensured that it became a regular stopping-off point for other seafarers. The town was named by a Dutch trader, Cornelis de Houtman, who in 1595 found a pile of mussel shells in a cave below the present lighthouse.